A collection of thoughts, ramblings and experience of making technology work for me. It may include some further diversions.

iTunes + iPad and syncing photos

The main incentive for picking up an iPad was to use it as a photo back up device during a long vacation; this post focuses on further woes with iTunes that stem from syncing (or not as it turns out) an iPad with photos that had been imported to the iPad via the official Apple iPad Camera Kit from an SD card.

The initial plan was to use the iPad to import images from a camera's SD card through the Apple iPad camera connection kit and onto the iPad; and eventually syncing the iPad back to a desktop PC running Windows XP to archive the photos. Essentially this would allow me to carry a small amount of flash memory on a long trip. Testing this out for the first time this week I noted that on syncing the iPad it only synced photos that had been transferred onto the iPad originally by iTunes and would not sync photos imported via the Apple iPad Camera Kit; cue big disappointment.

Now I'd kind of expect that for an integrated piece of software/hardware such as iTunes/iPad that it'd automatically sync imported photos but hey I guess not. This is not widely published on the Apple site and really should be referenced by the camera connection kit marketing page clearly. It doesn't appear to be a big deal to get the photos off but it looks like a manual solution is the only way at the moment which is frustrating for a £400 piece of kit, read Apple's copying personal photos and videos from iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to your computer:

Note: If you have a media application on your computer to which you would like your images and videos imported, you can select that program from the Scanners and Cameras window in the Control Panel. If left unaltered, Windows XP will run the Scanner and Cameras Wizard by default.

To import photos or video from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch use the Windows XP Scanner and Camera Wizard...

Other confounded users with the same issues exist on the Apple forums: